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The Big Sleaze1987 Piranha/Macmillan
Ltd. By
Fergus McNeill

Most
text of the present article comes from the preview published
in the twenty sixth issue of the British C64 magazine
ZZAP!64 (street date: May 14th, 1987) and the review published
in the twenty seventh issue (street date: June 11th, 1987).

Do
you have a version with the loading screen?

THE BIG SLEAZEPiranha,
£9.95 cassette only

et
another incomplete game lands on the Wiz's doorstep,
this time from those Piranha people who seem to
have struck up a very close friendship with Fergus
'The Boggit' McNeill.

By now just about everybody who plays adventures must
have heard of Fergus McNeill, founding father (I believe)
of Delta 4 software, who made their name with a whole
string of Quillustrated, irreverent spoofs. From Bored
Of The Rings onwards, Delta 4 seem to have taken
a tilt at most available targets, with varying success.

Despite
the enjoyment the Wiz got out of some of their earlier
games, I think they may be on to a rather tougher assignment
with The Big Sleaze than hitherto. First, any
take-off of Mickey Spillane/Damon Runyon-type gangsterism
has to compete with other games on the same theme (Bugsy
and Borrowed Time to name just two). Second,
unlike some of Delta 4's earlier targets, in the case
of American crime fiction the originals are just so
damn good!

Perhaps
it was because of my respect for pulpy American fiction
that I didn't find the humour in The Big Sleaze
nearly as refreshing as other Delta 4 releases -- on
the other hand I did find the detail of the game very
thought out and vividly written. As Sam Spillade, private
eye, you must wade your way through a number of cases
that come and go throughout a three-part loader (typical
Delta 4 format) ingeniously put together with the Quillustrator
ensemble.

The
graphics are great and the vocabulary has been very
well thought out -- in fact I'd go so far as to say
that what's there is the best of Delta 4's programming
efforts to date. It's just that after Bugsy and
Borrowed Time, the Wiz is getting a bit tired
of being a private eye.

THE BIG SLEAZEPiranha,
£9.95 cass

he
Wiz gave this a brief preview last month. Now
the finished version has popped onto his desk
and has revealed its secrets.

As with previous Fergus McNeil games (The Boggit,
Bored of the Rings and so on) this is a three-part/load
Quillustrated game with a sharp sense of parody. As
Private Eye Spillade your job is to solve a number of
crimes or mysteries, banking your clients cheques as
you attempt to avoid both bankruptcy and the numerous
threats of death and destruction that you encounter.

The
graphics are excellent (although there aren't an enormous
number of them), and combined with the copious and well-written
text they give the game a very attractive feel.

There
are a couple of things about this game that left the
Wiz slightly less impresses than he might have been.
Mr McNeil writes some pretty good prose when he relies
on taking the mickey out of the American detective story.
However, when he drops in one of his many risque jokes
(about private 'dicks', or shoving dynamite up a pig's
backside) things seem to start going downhill a bit.

Now,
don't think I'm being prudish (perhaps I am), because
we're not talking about anything particularly rude.
It's just that it seems so easy to make people laugh
by mentioning private dicks, or whatever. Okay, 'so
what's wrong with that', I hear you cry -- if people
laugh, then it must be funny. Perhaps it is -- but only
for the first time you read it, whereas the pleasure
the player gets from a well written, witty take-off
of Mickey Spillane tough-guy prose is more enduring.
Luckily there's a lot of the latter, but I do wish there
was less of the former.

The
other thing that annoyed me was the way the vocabulary
had been set up. I suspect that there was a memory problem
or something, because many of the essential actions
in the game do not have enough synonyms. For example,
when you find your car in the street, you might quite
naturally enter ENTER CAR. Unfortunately, 'You can't'.
That's a little misleading, since of course you can
-- but only by typing GET INTO CAR.

Similarly,
when you blow up the pig with the dynamite, you might
type LIGHT DYNAMITE, but again you can't -- you must
LIGHT FUSE. The latter case seems even more unfair,
because a close examination of the dynamite doesn't
reveal a fuse to light.

All
this is really as much of a reflection on the system
that Fergus McNeill uses to write his games. They're
good games and give a reasonable return for your investment,
but perhaps it's time Fergus chose another system.